Google is working with content owners to create a blacklist of infringing sites before the search engine algorithms can index them. Link removal requests on Google recently hit an all-time high of 6 billion URLs.
Google’s copyright infringement policy, as outlined on the Transparency Report page , complies with the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and “provides a simple and effective mechanism for copyright holders from countries/regions around the world.” The copyright owner can send a notice to Google to remove the alleged pirated link, and the search engine will remove the offending content from search results after careful review.
Over the past 10 years, Google has received 6,006,830,816 requests to remove links from search results from 326,888 copyright holders. 4,043,339 links were top-level domains. 333,253 inquiries were made by organizations acting on behalf of their rights holder clients.
The top 10 organizations collectively reported nearly 2.5 billion URLs, representing more than 40% of total searches.
Interestingly, just 400 domains are responsible for 41% of all Google delisting activity — in other words, almost half of the delistings are from sites that regularly host copyright infringing material, such as The Pirate Bay and others. In addition to the pirate hosts, the delisting requests sent to Google have included “false alarms” – complained about websites such as the White House, the FBI, Disney, Netflix and others.
The figures provided by Google show that the most popular search engine on the Internet and one of the largest technology companies, has a good relationship with content owners and rights holders. This is contrary to the times when the company actively opposed any third-party actions to limit web indexing. Google is now voluntarily working with third parties and accepting requests to remove links that haven’t even been indexed by the search engine yet.
Google creates a special “blacklist” to prevent pirated links from being added to search results in the future. Once important for the company, the issue of free “access to information” now looks like a small note. Google says there are still “active discussions with policy makers around the world about how best to combat online piracy and provide legitimate content to users.”
Earlier, Google announced that it would improve the “Results about you” tool – from 2023, users will be sent notifications when a personal number, email or home address appears in the search . The company says the new notification system will be available to everyone – although it will be a particularly useful tool for people in high positions or those who are being harassed. It’s worth noting that Google only removes search results, not the actual content on the web. The information will still be on any site that hosts it, but it will be harder for people to find it.
Source: techspot
